Pricing is really important in marketing because often times prices are chosen really really arbitrarily. Just looking at your competitor’s pricing, and using it as a sole reference for your pricing decision to modify your pricing accordingly to create an illusion of offering some small value isn’t the right way to go. There are other factors that must be considered.

There are four big inputs to pricing. These inputs must be considered while pricing a product in order to have a strong pricing strategy.

Company issues:

The company that manufactures a product will have certain financial considerations. The marginal cost of the product forms the floor of the pricing decision. This implies the price can’t be kept lower than the floor since the company intends to not just break-even, but also go on to make some profit. The company will have a certain target margin and/or internal rate of return which it shall consider while pricing the product.

The company also needs to consider being consistent in pricing with the product line. This implies the prices of new products will be influenced by prices of existing products in the product line.

The company also needs to be consistent in its image. Thus, when a pricing decision is being made, the company needs to ensure that the price does not make the product extremely high-end or low-end compared to the company’s existing image as a seller. As an instance, Walmart can’t sell very high priced products because of its low product price range.

Competitor issues:

The price at which your competitors are offering the same product as yours will give a good insight as to tentatively where you might want to price your product. Several considerations must be made here.

Competitor aggressiveness is an important one. It refers to the ability of a competitor to sustain a price-based response i.e., whether a competitor has “deep-pockets”. What this means is that if you launch your product at a certain pricing, will a competitor likely offer their product at a lower cost than before so as to make their product offering seem more attractive, and yet be able to sustain the low profits it will make, given the competitor has deep pockets to fall back upon. Thus, having “deep pockets” is directly related to a propensity for “irrational behavior” among your competitor.

It’s also important to consider the various ways competitors might respond to a said pricing of your company. Is the competitor more likely to respond by improving their advertising or product? Or will they respond by making their distribution system more robust and efficient to reduce costs? If not, will the competitor respond by lowering their prices? These questions must be worked out to see how a competitor may respond.

You must also consider the position of the competitor.

Market leaders are likely to initiate, and followers are likely to imitate.

Market leaders have, in some sense, a responsibility to keep the prices high. Thus, if you decide to want to go slightly against market norms, you might want to step back and think it through before going further with the pricing decision.

Collaborator issues:

It’s important to keep the price high enough to give money to distributors/resellers to motivate them to sell it. The higher the margins set for these distributors/retailers/resellers, the more they are likely to push the product further.

These collaborators shall assess a product offering via the margins and Return on Assets (Profits/Assets) it offers to them.

Customer issues:

This might just entail the most important considerations. The customer’s willingness to pay is the amount which forms the ceiling of the pricing.

Price sensitivity is an important factor to consider. To understand this, price elasticity must be studied.

So, for instance, if on increasing the price by 1%, demand goes down by 5%, the product is very price elastic and you might want to drop the price a little.
Similarly, if on increasing the price by 1%, demand goes down by just 0.2%, the product is very price inelastic and you might want to increase the price a little.

Psychological issues must also be considered as a part of customer issues. Since price sensitivity and psychological issues both form a large domain of study under customer issues, I shall do a dedicated blog post on these in detail soon.

Thus, we looked at the four big inputs to pricing decisions here. In conclusion, the pricing must lie between the floor (as set by the cost of making the product) and the ceiling (the maximum customer willingness to pay). Between the floor and the ceiling, the pricing decisions are influenced by collaborator and competitor issues largely. That’s how a wholesome pricing decision is made, with appropriate consideration of each of the factors that must be taken into account. This blog post forms a part of the bigger discussion on pricing I shall have on the blog, in my later blog posts. Pricing is an extremely important consideration to keep in mind, and it can truly make or break a product’s entire marketing strategy!

Creating images to go with your blog, website or social media pages can be quite a task. Spending too much time and money on design and outsourced photography is almost always not desirable, especially for personal bloggers. At the same time, these are also aspects that can’t be skipped, for the sake of the aesthetics. Well, the good news is it doesn’t have to be skipped. Here’s the beautiful solution to this problem – FREE STOCK IMAGES.

There are tons of stock image photography websites, which are basically repositories of pictures that can be purchased for personal use. Stock photos allow people to add visually compelling content on their websites without the hassle of generating these images via outsourced photography or design. These stock images can complement your content and make your website wholesome giving it the design it needs.

Again, although stock images offer a wonderful way to light up your personal blog with the right pictures, it may not always be easy for personal bloggers to invest in buying stock images. But, that’s no reason to worry because this is the part where I introduce you all to royalty-free images available on the internet. These images are available for free use to everyone, including any commercial use.

Bloggers around the world in any and all niches rely on free stock images for their website’s image needs. These beautiful images will give your content the right thing to go with, and there’s always plenty of them to choose from for any keywords you might be searching for.

Here, I give you 20 top websites on the internet with stunning royalty-free images to choose from.

These top 20 websites will ensure you never have a dearth of images ever again, no matter what you’re looking for. You might find yourself submerged in endless images once you get to find the perfect image for your needs. Wishing you the best in your image exploration endeavors.

The Medium publishing platform is one of the most emerging platforms today. Founded in August 2012 by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, Medium has grown tremendously to over 180 million monthly visitors as of this year. The new kid on the block isn’t as new anymore but continues to grow rapidly.

Medium is set to be a game-changer in the future. And, that’s why it’s so important that businesses realize the immense potential of the platform and capitalize on it while it’s still young and nascent enough to offer new businesses the edge of starting early. I have stressed the importance of starting early on emerging platforms to earn disproportionate benefits in one of my earlier blogs as well.

Whether it’s Medium’s clean minimalistic design, high-quality credible content, or the insanely high exposure to readers that worked for it, we can say with certainty that Medium is here to stay.

Learning about Medium has been so overwhelming that I’m in the process of importing all posts from this website to Medium as well. Yes, SameerSells is now on Medium, also. Go ahead, and follow us. I talk about the massive benefits of importing one’s existing blog posts to the Medium platform in the later part of this article. Stay tuned.

SameerSells on Medium

So, here I talk about my top marketing strategies to grow on Medium, based on my observations and experience with the platform. These strategies are game-changers if you are looking to up your game on Medium.

CHOOSING SAME TAGS AS TOP STORIES IN YOUR CATEGORY

Tags are extremely important for discoverability and categorization on Medium. Medium allows the use of up to 5 tags with each story we post. You must use these limited tags really well in order to be discovered.

One great way to optimize the use of the tags is to use the same tags are top stories in your niche. This is destined to work for you because it worked to make the top stories, the top stories after all.

Head over to the search bar, and search for the most relevant keyword to your niche, for instance, “business”. Top articles in this category. Focus on the right side of the screen which shows the most used tags in this niche. Use these.

The tags on the right can be observed

ENGAGE WITH PEOPLE INTERESTED IN THE SAME NICHE AS YOURS

When people engage with your content (clap/comment/highlight), this shows they are interested in what you write. Now, they may not always follow you in such cases, but you can engage with their content instead in a number of ways like follow/comment/clap/highlight so that they notice you and likely follow you. Plus, engagements in the form of replies to their comments on your posts help your post do better.

In general as well, when you engage with people in the same niche as yours, it helps you get noticed. And, there’s a chance they will follow you since they are interested in this niche. There are a number of ways of doing this.

– Mass following strategy and the 1:10 principle:
Go to an influencer’s profile in your niche, say Gary Vaynerchuk in Business. Go to this person/publication’s list of followers. Follow these people. When you follow 10 people, roughly 1 follows you back.

You can follow about 100-200 people in a day without being prompted by Medium that you are inhibited to follow any more people for the next 24 hours. And, you can be assured that Medium will never block your account for something like this, but only prompt.

– Mass comment strategy:
There are no restrictions on commenting set by Medium. You can literally comment your way through any number, at any rate. What you can do is prepare a general comment that you can do on all posts in your niche. Keep this comment as generic as possible.

Once your comment is ready, you can mass spam on as many articles as you possibly can. You’re likely to earn followers via this method of discovery if you have some solid content on your Medium profile.

–Individual comment strategy (marking and engaging):
You can do more customized responses to people’s stories by highlighting a part of their posts and/or commenting on this highlighted part as a public note. When you follow this person now, you have a much higher chance of a follow back, since you have made an effort to create a personal engagement. Roughly speaking, 1 in every 2 people you follow this way are likely to follow you back.

These strategies will especially push you up through an initial stage when you’re struggling with a minimal following and can’t really implement much of the other strategies that follow later in the article which need you to show some credibility in terms of your following. Thus, this strategy can help you get off the floor with an initial take off, and once you’re at a decent number of followers, you can go after the more effective strategies.

And although some of these strategies might come across as spammy, they work. So, if you’re ready to put in the extra time, you can see the extra results.

CALL TO ACTION (CTA) AT THE END OF YOUR ARTICLES

Asking readers to clap and share at the end of your article isn’t really enough. A person might end up giving you a clap or so if they enjoy your article, but almost always they won’t share it with their network.

Your article should offer a Call To Action (CTA) at the end of your article which people can go for. This can be a link to another one of your articles which is similar to that one. This works particularly if you have a long piece of writing split into a series of multiple articles. You can direct your readers to the next part of the article in the series via a CTA at the end.

Not only that, you can use have a CTA asking readers to, say, follow you on a certain social media like Twitter. This can help with your social media following as well.

Offering CTAs like these will help you with views on your other articles.

Other than CTAs, you can collect email addresses from readers signing them up for your newsletter, or offer some reward in return for providing their email address (an e-book, an online course, tips for growth). As such, Medium does not have a built-in feature to collect email addresses. You can use a third-party website to do the same. Upscribe is one such free tool.

Upscribe – An embeddable newsletter signup form

PUBLISHING YOUR ARTICLES WITH TOP MEDIUM MAGAZINES

This is probably the biggest way you can grow massively on Medium. Publications are a great way to get more of your people to discover your content. You can check out toppub.xyz for a list of top publications on Medium which have the highest followings.

Once you choose a publication you would wish to write for, you can contact them talking about this. Make sure to have a good Medium profile beforehand with some solid quality articles so to up the chances of your application getting accepted. You might want to target pages with medium popularity instead of big ones, to begin with.

When you write on your Medium profile, you get discovered mainly only by your followers. But, when you write for a publication, you get discovered also by the followers of the publication so to boost your following. Good writing that gets discovered in a publication which is targeted to your niche content is definitely a brilliant way to build your audience.

STARTING YOUR OWN PUBLICATION ON MEDIUM

If you’re serious about blogging, start a publication on Medium from the start. Setting up a publication on Medium is effortless. Invite popular authors in your niche to contribute to your publication, or ask them to let one of their existing articles be a part of your publication.

If your niche gets a lot of news and updates regularly (like Technology or Politics), things sound even better. You’ll be able to generate content more regularly for your publication.

Medium also allows you to send newsletter-style emails to all your publication readers and followers. Sending regular medium letters is a powerful strategy.

Additionally, you can also create a typeform and keep the link in your publication somewhere for aspiring contributors to effortlessly contact you via this form, since Medium has no form of messaging.

The signatory section of an article I’ve written for my publication SameerSells on Medium

IMPORTING YOUR BLOG/WEBSITE’S ARTICLES ON MEDIUM

If you already have a website or a blog where you have content, this is some amazing news for you. Medium allows you to import your articles from elsewhere onto your Medium account. It’s an effortless one-click process doing so.

On importing your articles, you might want to adjust the formatting and/or check whether the images got correctly imported. After editing, you can publish your article on Medium.

Medium.com’s import stories page. Yes, it’s that simple!

Importantly, you can note that Google doesn’t penalize you for repurposing content in this manner on account of duplication. It’s completely legitimate for you to do so.

I highly, highly recommend you do this. Top bloggers and websites like Buffer, Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel have done it for themselves and have vouched for the amazing results. Medium can bring you a 1000% increase in views when you compare it with your website’s views, largely by virtue of its algorithm, and emerging platform status.

You can leverage these views to redirect your viewers back to your website thus boosting your website traffic as well, among other things. The possibilities to leverage these large views are endless.

MORE ACTIONABLE MICRO TIPS TO GROW ON MEDIUM

#Timing of posting: Saturday mornings make for the best time to post your articles on Medium. You have a higher chance of landing as one of Medium Staff’s handpicked article.

#Building social media following: Insert CTA ‘Follow me on Twitter/Facebook” images in your articles to increase your social media following as well, while you’re at it.

#Creative comments: Write genuine and creative comments on popular Medium stories. That way, the author is likely to respond to you and helps you with the chance of being a top comment thus appearing as the only comment right below the Medium article, and getting a good exposure.

#Micro-stats: Based on observations and studies, it has been seen that 7-minute posts, with 400-words and 42-character headlines on an average work the best. You might want to optimize your articles accordingly.

#Embed media: Medium allows you to embed tweets, YouTube videos, Instagram posts etc. content into your posts. Make the most of it, as this might help boost your social media following while also offering a richer and interesting look to your articles.

#Link back to your website: Do this in as many places as you can (your bio, articles, CTA).

#First impression: Use pleasing images, customized titles, and subtitles for your articles as this help form the first impression on your potential readers. It’s important to make it a good one.

#Recommend great articles: which are relevant to your industry. Your followers will come across your recommendations on their feeds. Take advantage to position yourself as an influential voice in the field by recommending really interesting content.

With the growth that Medium has seen, it goes without saying that it’s only set to become bigger. Now would be the right time to jump on this bandwagon for a good ride you won’t regret. I only wish you luck and success on your journey!

The overpowering goal of all firms remains to maximize shareholder value. And that isn’t much of a surprise since shareholder value is probably the highest metric any business can gauge their performance on. But, the way organizations work towards achieving this differs in principles. Organizations can be product-centric or customer-centric in their approach. All organizations employ a mix of both strategies to varying degree, as focussing completely on just one of them is never really a plausible approach!

Simply put, a product-centric organization focusses on their products while a customer-centric organization focusses on their customers.

A product-centric firm is fixed on developing the product, innovating and trying to reduce cost. Driving force remains looking internally at their capabilities rather than externally at what needs still remain unmet. Their profitability comes from volumes, and the business objective largely remains increase of market share. The organizational structure has product divisions. This kind of an approach is ideal in a seller’s market, where the seller has the greater amount of power and the competition isn’t enough to unnerve them. Not surprising then that this has been the norm in firms for a long, long time now.

A customer-centric firm, on the flip side, is fixed on assessing what the customer wants and delivering value. They have to fight in a competitive landscape to see that the customers buy from them. Profitability comes from creating value, not necessary volumes. The focus is on increasing wallet share from few valuable customers rather than necessarily on market share. Customer loyalty, cross-selling and premium prices are what create profitability for these firms in a buyer’s market. This has not usually dominated company strategies in the past, due to market situations.

However, firms today realize the importance of incorporating a healthy mix of customer-centricity with their product-centric nature. Due to new emerging trends in the last 15-20 years, the product-centric approach is no longer as great as it used to be.

Let’s get to discussing these limitations in the product-centric approaches in contemporary markets.

Technology-enabled information flow:
Today’s customers are smart. Due to developments in information flow via the internet, they have access to much more information today. This makes today’s customers aware, unlike the passive purchase tendencies in the customers from the days of the past. Companies can no longer work their work around these customers by just focussing on their products.

Technology-enabled delivery:
In older days, even if other companies were making products similar to yours, there was not much to worry because the communication and distribution systems weren’t robust enough for these competitors to really take over your existing customer base. The customers might not even be aware of your competitors and may not have access to their products, so they continue to rely on you. Today, we have great mass communication and distribution systems. This brings in a huge amplification in effects of competition, and to stand out, your company needs customer-centricity too.

Technology-enabled product development:
Product life cycles have shortened. New companies enter markets rapidly because product conceiving is much faster and easier today. This has brought in a wave of commoditization. Products can now be commoditized and focussing just on your products is not the smart move in going a long way to differentiate your services to your potential customers.

Deregulations:
Companies can’t regulate to maintain monopolies anymore. Instead, the government might choose to impose regulations on companies to ensure fairness in the system, by asking these big companies to act in a certain way. This has truly put competition at the forefront of challenges that firms need to deal with.

Data:
The sheer amount of data that can be yielded from business processes today can be humongous. Information systems enable customer-level tracking. Data can be a big game changer today. Companies can capitalize on the enormous potential of right data use to be much more effective at their business. A focus on this data would mean focus on customer-centricity.

Increase in customer demand:
Customers are much more demanding today. They want “end-to-end” solutions which may require products/services from multiple vendors. This further inhibits commoditization. The company that can be sensitive to these demands of customers and offer exactly what they need, can go a long way in maintaining their stronghold on the market.

Globalization:
Customers today are looking for global products much more than ever before. This pits your company against essentially all the companies around the world working in your market. It’s more competitive than it has ever been.

All of these reasons show us why customer-centric management is inevitable in today’s markets if companies are to withstand competition and stay in the game. Now, to be truly customer-centric, not only do firms need to be interested in customers on a macro level but also at a granular level. It requires us to look ahead, figure out who the valuable customers will be, and do things for them to help them realize that we have their best interests in mind. Also, customer-centricity is not just a sudden ideological change. It requires companies to be willing and able to change its organizational structure, design, performance metrics and employee/distributor incentive structures to focus on this long run-value creation and delivery process.

The shift towards customer-centricity is a really exciting news for customers. When the firms focus on customers to win, the customers also win. Customer-centric firms celebrate customer heterogeneity, thus distinguishing the profitable customers from the less profitable ones, and focussing on these customers who offer a higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to the firm. That’s actually great. For instance, if you’re a big-time Starbucks fan, and find yourself buying a coffee at Starbucks almost every day, how exciting it is to know that a customer-centric Starbucks now values you much more than just any other customer, and you’re in for really rewarding loyalty programs, discounts, offers, freebies, and customer service. If Starbucks plays it well, they will still accomplish increasing your wallet share towards Starbucks slyly, but you win too by getting more of a bang for your buck than before.

And, it’s really interesting to realize that none of this suggests that “non-focal” customers of a firm should be ignored. On the contrary, it is important to have a healthy proportion of such customers to add a high degree of stability and robustness to the overall customer base. This is the paradox of customer centricity: the more a firm tightens its central focus on a select group of customers, the more it needs its “non-focal” customers to stabilize the overall mix.

Thus, with customer-centricity, everybody wins – the organization, the focal customers, as well as the non-focal customers!

Conquest is India’s largest student-run startup conclave, organized by the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL) of BITS Pilani. Early this September, I happened to attend the Grand Finale of the 2017 Edition of Conquest. It was an absolute spectacle – an overwhelming mega fair of everything entrepreneurship. Attended by Venture Capitalists, Founders, Finalists, and Startup enthusiasts, the event was truly chicken soup for the entrepreneurial soul. With outstanding startup pitches by the finalists, intriguing panel discussions by the jury, a stimulating Fishbowl Q&A session and a fantastic keynote speech, everybody was pumped up to exchange ideas. The event, like typical such events, was a networking paradise. It offered tremendous opportunities for people to connect with each other, on a day when people who might appear to be the most unapproachable of the lot, were approachable. [Read more…]